From the opening line (“He was born in the dying days.”) Barry is clear about the theme and trajectory of this work of historical fiction which takes place mostly during WW1. Shifting between the tensions in Ireland, from the Easter Rising and the independence movement, to the infamous fields of Flanders and battle-scarred Belgium, Barry personifies the Lost Generation through the character of Willie Dunne. The babies born in 1896 are grist for the millstone of war, their delivery nurses blood-stained uniforms likened to butcher’s aprons.

Although the language is often beautifully rendered and a real sense of Irish sensibility permeates the book, the problem lies in its lack of revelation: there are no real surprises along the way, in either character development or narrative arc. We learn nothing we did not already know. Perhaps for those unfamiliar with 20th century Irish history or who have not read novels such as All Quiet On the Western Front and many other fine novels about the horrors of the First World War, this book may introduce new perspectives. At times, it almost felt like a checklist: innocent young Everyman, youthful lust/ love, father and son symbolizing dying of old world and the inability of the previous generations to understand the new, bromance, explanation of war (gas, attrition, no man’s land, trench, officer vs private) all dutifully employed.

One expects a war novel to describe harrowing scenes. The descriptions of gas attacks were relatively restrained and other soldier deaths were not prolonged pages of horror. The more disturbing imagery was reserved for the mutilation and rape of a woman and the butchering of an animal. Too many authors employ these scenes as a lazy way to announce The Moral Decay of War, the degradation and sheer vileness at work, while sparing the male characters similar graphic portrayals.

There are some exquisite phrasings and an immediacy to the work that certainly warrant admiration. But it is a book most of us have read before; the individual characters a little too subsumed by theme. ( )

Really good story of the First World War and the mental confusion caused by the Easter Rising. Gets into the soldiers' minds plausibly. What it was like in the trenches.

The third novel by Sebastian Barry (from the ones still in print anyway; 5th if you count the two he published in the 80s) returns to the formula of the previous two (Eneas McNulty and Annie Dunne) - a child born close to the start of the century in Ireland comes of age and lives through the craziness that follows allowing Barry to explore the lives of the people who lived through all the changes, all the hopes and all the misery.

Willie Dunne cannot wait to grow up. Born to a a policeman, he proves to be too short to become one and instead enrolls into the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and crosses the channel to fight. Except that the war is not the only thing happening - Ireland erupts in revolt at around the same time and Willie finds himself on both fronts.

It is a hard to read novel in some places - the rawness and awfulness of WWI is all here on display and the disillusionment of Willie and his generation is a fitting companion to the bleakness of the landscape - usually lush and full of life but now covered in mud and death. And if you also happened to be Irish, you also had to deal with what was happening back home - the struggle for independence, the attempt to get the English off everyone's neck. Willie has the added burden of his upbringing and his father's lack of understanding for any changes.

If you had read the novel Annie Dunne or you had read or seen the play The Steward of Christendom, you already know how this tale needs to finish. Because Willie is Annie's brother - the boy who came back as a ghost to his father bed-side when the old policeman was slowly losing his mind in the county home, the only son of a man who had to see all he believed in crumble.

If you never read any of them, the surprise may come as a surprise although it fits the novel and no other ending would have worked.

It is a novel about WWI and the Irish in WWI - split between home and the war, trying to fight for their country in different ways. It may be one of the best WWI novels you can find out there - both brutal and lyrical. And Barry manages to weave into the narrative enough personality and personal loss to make it as much a WWI story as the story of a man called Willie Dunne. ( )

Didn’t finish because of wwi trenches details.

It's a long long way to Tipperary,
But my heart's right there.

In A Long Long Way, Sebastian Barry takes on another little considered, very complicated moment in Irish history, the Irish involvement in World War I. He cuts through the veneer and shows us a war that was, as wars always are, horrible and cruel and costly. And, he shows us the personal cost to the men (dare I say boys) who fought it. Not since reading All Quiet have I felt I was so close to the horrors of one man’s experience of World War I.

However, one war is not enough for Barry, he must tell us of two, for there is another war waging beside the World War that is being fought by so many Irishmen in Belgium and France, and that is the war within Ireland being fought on Irish soil. Willie Dunne is a good Irish boy who joins the British army to do his part in the war against Germany, and finds himself in the middle of the political struggle between those who favor Irish home rule and those who feel a part of and loyal to English rule. Seen as traitors by many of their Irish peers, the men of these Irish brigades are also disparaged by many of the British who command them, adding to the unendurable realities of the war, and making one wonder why any of them would be there or how any returned.

Between your own countrymen deriding you for being in the army, and the army deriding you for your own slaughter, a man didn’t know what to be thinking. A man’s mind could be roaring out in pain of a sort. The fact that the war didn’t make a jot of sense any more hardly came into it.

Sebastian Barry brings poetry to his writing. He describes the inexplicable in a way that is ominously vivid.

There had been no warning barrage and the dense smoke didn’t look too threatening. It was beautiful in a way, the yellow seemed to boil about, and sink into whatever craters it was offered, and then rise again with the march of the main body of smoke. There were still birds singing behind them, but whatever birds had been singing in front of them were silent now. Captain Pasley removed his hat and scratched his balding pate and put the hat back on again.

And, he gives us Willie’s young, innocent eyes to see it through. Willie, who has never had a chance to decide what his life should be, who worships the idea of love in the person of Gretta, whose little sister adores him because he is so good to her, and who struggles with how little black and white he finds in his world, how murky the shades of grey.

Ah, Sebastian Barry, he tugs at my heart, squeezing until I feel it will burst, and then he sets me down so gently that the tears in my eyes feel like the cleansing water of a mountain stream, the purging of a rank injustice, or perhaps just a memory of home.
( )